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Marco Rubio goes all-in on immigration bill

Marco Rubio is preparing to go all in to support sweeping immigration legislation, offering himself up as the public face of a bill that will split the Republican Party — but that his allies hope will propel him to the front of the GOP presidential sweepstakes.

After offering lukewarm support until now, Rubio is preparing to fully embrace a measure that is the most significant of his political career so far. The gambit could pay off in spades by crowning a leading presidential contender in 2016, or it could permanently damage the Republican’s brand with conservatives.

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Rubio to hit 7 Sunday Shows, Mike Allen reports

POLITICO Roundtable: Win for Rubio on immigration reform?

Rubio is planning a media blitz to promote the bill — which is expected to be released early next week — making the rounds on all of the Sunday political talk shows starting this weekend, wooing skeptical conservative radio hosts and pitching the plan to Spanish-language news outlets. The campaign is aimed at building public support for the far-reaching immigration bill that will dominate Capitol Hill’s attention for much of the year.

“Obviously, we’ll be informing the public, and we’ll want everyone to know everything that’s in the bill,” Rubio told POLITICO Thursday. “We want everyone to know as much of what’s in the bill as possible, and we will use every opportunity we have to communicate that.”

Behind the scenes, the potential 2016 aspirant has already launched a lobbying campaign to convince conservatives that the plan will be tough on the border. The goal is to assuage GOP concerns over the pathway to citizenship that would be offered to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants, allowing them to apply for citizenship after 13 years as the new enforcement measures take effect.

The Florida Republican has privately briefed individual GOP senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee — including conservative skeptics John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah — about the soon-to-be-unveiled proposal, according to sources familiar with the matter. His staff has pitched the plan to conservative thought leaders, including at the National Review and Wall Street Journal editorial board as well as the columnist Charles Krauthammer, sources say.

And after being rebuffed in his bid for extensive hearings on the bill before the Judiciary Committee, the senator wants to launch his own public hearing process of sorts to allow Republican senators to question expert witnesses about the plan, a move aimed at alleviating conservative fears that the plan will be jammed through Congress with little public airing.

Far from dropping out of the group, as some suspected after his tepid comments recently, Rubio will essentially become its most prominent salesman, effectively putting his political capital — and presidential ambitions — on the line in the process. With momentum behind the push, Rubio clearly has calculated it makes more sense for him to fully embrace the effort, rather than run away from it and potentially kill the measure just as it is introduced.